THE WRITER’S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES

I.  Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II.  Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III.  In your working conditions, avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an étude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV.  Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V.  Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI.  Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII.  Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII.  Fill the lacunae in your inspiration by tidily copying out what you have already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX.  Nulla dies sine linea—but there may well be weeks.

X.  Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI.  Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII.  Stages of composition: idea—style—writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration; style fetters the idea; writing pays off style.

XIII.  The work is the death mask of its conception. (One-Way Street)

“She came, gentle and sweet, bringing peace, at a time when I was the loneliest and most miserable boy in the world. She made all my secrets vanish into her. For she made me feel that everything I had kept secret was kept back just to tell her—we were joined within a secret that was divulged to us by touching where we had never touched before, and by the honesty of passion where we had been dishonest before. After our honesty with each other, what more was there to hide? We had told. Passionate love is a conspiracy to tell each other’s truth to each other—that I am like this and you are like that, and together, in a joining, we make a moment’s truth of what each is. Beyond the moment’s truth, though, lies the hour’s untruth, which keeps yearning to be bared into truth again. She broke my unreality against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against and mended me with all the care in the world, it seemed. For her I betrayed you and for myself I betrayed her; we melted into each other. I tricked you and left you; and after I had left you, all your kin and all your world died away from you and fell away, leaving you broken off and isolate. All of us were shattered from our whole, I roaming through the world with Evella, you sitting by the window trying to piece everything together again in a falling house. (The House of Breath)

“Sometimes, because I am a failure in the world, I blame my failure on you all; say that you got me so mixed up when I was young that I can never clear myself up again inside; or that you made me so false to myself that I am unreal and never can be real. But I must see that the reason I am a failure is that I gave myself away to everybody and so had none of myself left for myself—I mean the part of oneself that is the part he works with, held by himself to work with.

“And yet I collaborated with you in making myself false—for I was so afraid of myself and what it wanted to do, and so ashamed of it. So you and I together stomped the life out of it, every day, mangling it like a beetle.

“But suddenly something beyond all of us, greater than all of us, freed us from each other. We tore at our hearts because we were powerless against this thing that came in between us and wrenched us apart. This was loving somebody. (The House of Breath)

Joyce's Dublin was in fact an eighteenth century parody. The technique he developed, the technique which underlies everything from the first pages of Dubliners to the end of Finnegans Wake, came out of the subject: parody: double-writing. The music-halls parodied the heroic dramas; Joyce parodied the music-halls. Journalism parodied heroic elegance: Joyce parodied journalism. He focussed, that is to say, on what was actually there, and strove so to set it down that it would reveal itself as what it was, in its double nature: a distortion, but a distortion of something real. All his characters are walking clichés, because the Dubliners were; a Leopold Bloom is simultaneously a "case" and a person. All his dialogue is an assemblage of locutions reçues into unexpected patterns: unexpected because he was dealing with human beings, whose natural spontaneity the past could not quite batten down:

- Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.

- It is, Bloom said.

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. . . . Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the ethereal. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirty-five thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like till you hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right, then bear chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks over barrels, through wirefences, obstacle race. U273/264. (Dublin's Joyce)